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Google-An update to our search algorithms - Copyright Related
- some1else 14y agoThis will mean ore traffic for http://www.filecrop.com http://www.filecrop.com and http://www.filestube.com http://www.filestube.com.
- drucken 14y agoCopyright wars begin in earnest...
- elsewhen 14y agoWon't this impact YouTube dramatically?
- davidbrent 14y agoSo when I google an artist/song, someone's upload on youtube would not be in the first three results?
- simonbrown 14y agoYouTube responds to DMCA requests so I assume copyright holders would contact them first, and not need to send notices to Google (search).
- btipling 14y agoIt's not about the site responding to DCMA requests, because how would Google know about this? This about how many DCMA requests Google gets to delist a search result I believe.
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoRight. What I think the parent comment is saying is that if they have contacted YouTube directly, Google (the search engine) would not get served with a take-down notice... YouTube would and it would have no influence on Google Rank.
- Ralith 14y agoFor smaller sites, why would rights-holders bother trying to contact the site when they can just get it delisted from google?
- simonbrown 14y agoI never mentioned smaller sites. Still, if you mean a smaller site operating like YouTube, contacting them directly would allow it to be taken off the internet rather than just out of Google results. Still, they might contact Google as well, and thus harm their rank.
- Ralith 14y agoIndeed. There's no incentive for rightsholders not to hedge their bets, and so even well-meaning user-generated content sites will suffer. Unless they're google properties, presumably.
- B-Con 14y agoFTA: > Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Following the link, you get to this page of stats ( http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/?r=last-month http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/... ) on take-down requests. If that page is what they make their basis on, then YouTube doesn't crack the top pages, so I would guess that it won't be hurt too badly. Although, I have no idea if their count for YouTube is accurate or not. It's not like they wouldn't have an interest in under-reporting the numbers.
- lukesandberg 14y agoread the FAQ for the site (or the "Whats included" box on overview page). "The data below consists of the copyright removal requests we've received through our web form for Google Search. It is a partial historical record that includes more than 95% of the copyright removal requests that we have received for Google Search since July 2011." In other words youtube data is not included. This is only for websearch
- magicalist 14y agoThat's the point. If they are going to rank links to youtube the same way as they link any other sites (as gp is using as the basis of the question), they would only use search takedown requests as the signal, not requests that youtube receives directly.
- elsewhen 14y agohere is the detail page for youtube: https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/youtube.com/ https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...
- AznHisoka 14y agoIf if YouTube does receive a high level of copyright notices, you can bet they have a special case for ranking YouTube videos, just because they own it.
- maxerickson 14y agoThere's some room for it to be a left hand vs right hand thing. That is, if the YouTube portion of Google is responsive to takedown notices, then the Google Search portion of Google isn't getting notices to remove those pages from the index.
- kragen 14y agoIt might "impact" YouTube's competitors even more dramatically.
- mtgx 14y agoI wonder if this has anything to do with Google wanting to server more and more paid content through Google Play and Youtube. Will Google be on our side or their side when the next SOPA bill appears?
- forrestthewoods 14y agoI have no idea what "our side" is supposed to stand for in this context. Is "our side" the side that wants unlimited copyright infringement? I support that side as little as I support SOPA-like bills.
- muuh-gnu 14y ago"our side" is the pro-freedom, pro-copying, information-wants-to-be-free, consumer side. "their side" is the pro-restriction, pro-enforcement, pro-1984 content producer side. > I support that side as little as I support SOPA-like bills. Theire is no "undecided" side. Either you support copyright enforcement against people who want to freely share information without a north-korea-style censorship body over their shoulders, or you dont. There is no middle ground. You cant support "a little bit" of censorship.
- gphil 14y agoI don't agree. There is plenty of middle ground, and I think most people tend to fall around the center of the spectrum. I for one don't support SOPA, yet support the notion of copyright.
- freshhawk 14y agoThe middle ground is imaginary. For the types of copyright infringement everyone is probably thinking of (music, audiobooks, music videos, tv shows, movies, books) that are easy to turn into bits there is only one possible way to enforce copyright and that is large scale surveillance of the internet in order to police the content. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see much middle ground. Not when you think it all the way through to taking actual action to protect copyrighted works. Besides SOPA style surveillance systems how do you enforce the notion of copyright that you support? It's too late to try and use social norms and make it uncool or embarrassing to have downloaded something without paying the creator. People will share things if they can unless someone stops them. No one who isn't a strawman supports "unlimited copyright infringement" or doesn't want the artists we love to get paid, they just understand the tradeoffs that would have to be made to keep enforcing our current (historically recent) copyright system in the modern age and don't feel that abandoning some of the fundamentals of western democracy in order to temporarily protect the business models of those who currently pay artists is a worthwhile tradeoff.
- iyulaev 14y agoWhat happens if you have two pages, each listing the takedown notices applied to the other? Seed the pages periodically and wouldn't you get a pretty good measure of the popularity of your taken-down links by ranking them based on how often they are taken down?
- WiseWeasel 14y agoSo if you want to decrease a competitor's search engine placement, would you just have to file C&D notices on them? I don't see how the amount of C&D notices correlates with value to users. Google does not appear to be benefiting its users in doing this.
- wmf 14y agoYou'd probably have to file thousands of takedowns and hope the site doesn't challenge them.
- lukesandberg 14y agoAlso, Google outright rejects some dmca requests and Google also releases data about the actions of copyright owners and DMCA activity on http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/. So even if not all abuses were caught they would at least be published for public scrutiny.
- onli 14y agoThis is wrong. Google should aim to provide the best possible result for the search. If that is an copyrighted videostream on a non-authorized site (e.g. a stream of all of the episodes of the series i'm googling for), this should be exactly the first result. And not a lame but authorized preview of 30 seconds. Already found myself using duckduckgo in such cases, imagining the results were better.
- barista 14y agoDoes this mean Google will never surface YouTube in its search results? That is probably the largest and most known source of copyright infringing material
- fascinated 14y agoHeh yeah, that is amusingly unaddressed
- maxerickson 14y agoYouTube follows the DMCA (and does ContentID or whatever). Google search probably doesn't get very many requests to remove links to YouTube. This policy shouldn't have much impact at all on any large site that discourages copyright violations and responds promptly to DMCA takedowns, because it isn't worth bothering Google Search about that content.
- capsule_toy 14y agoI agree this is probably what's happening but I'm worried this might change in the future. Right now I think all that happens is that the link is removed from the search results but if the site itself is also penalized, I'm afraid content owners can now see the value of sending both a DMCA and copyright takedown notice simultaneously.
- rhizome 14y agoNot until they're forced, and likely they'd only listen to the Supreme Court on that point.
- HotKFreshSwag 14y agoHow does this work for countries with different copyright laws?
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThere are a lot of interesting signals for web spam and poor web content. I don't know if this one is very good. In particular I see this scenario: 1) Google algorithmically genreates take down notices on youtube, they move this over to search results. 2) Algorithms 'err on the side of caution' with regard to fair use. 3) Every page that quotes or excerpts a copyrighted work gets flagged. 4) So Google 'manually' makes exceptions for sites they strongly believe won't engage in poor behavior (NY Times, Techcrunch, whatever) 5) No new web site that reviews products or provides critical analysis ever makes it to Google's front page. That might be a stretch, the auto-flag stuff on YouTube is out of control, and then trying to use that as a signal in results is just inviting abuse. Black hat SEOs are malicious enough without dealing with 'Copyright joejobs' [ Full disclosure: I work at a search engine blekko.com ]
- revelation 14y agoThis has nothing to do with search quality. This is just Google bowing down to big copyright. They have done it before with the autocomplete feature, censoring many suggested terms. They have been asking for this for a long time now. "De-ranking" is number one on this proposal: http://www.scribd.com/doc/79607883/Proposals-to-Search-Engines http://www.scribd.com/doc/79607883/Proposals-to-Search-Engin... It seems Google has cushioned this in sweet words, as to not make it blatantly obvious. These sites were very high on the rankings because people click them (and rarely return to search further). Google simply aligned its search results with peoples needs. Google is enabling media companies in their delusions, when they could be destroying them. They might end up as a casualty.
- res0nat0r 14y agoCompanies are delusional for submitting DMCA takedowns?
- revelation 14y agoThey are delusional for thinking strong-arming Google into censoring "pirate sites" and having it operate search dogs that crawl YouTube for anything that reeks of copyright will magically preserve their role as middlemen in a world with internet connectivity and cause customers everywhere to submit CC details to their subpar offerings. Of course, none of that is going to happen. I'm just complaining that Google feels the need to join the bandwagon when it could be embracing the change.
- guelo 14y agoSpeaking of deteriorating Google search results, my latest peeve is when a search shows dozens of results from the same domain. There used to be the much more sensible "show more results from this domain" link. I have a hard time imagining why Google thinks the new way is better, my guess is some designers wanted to remove the link because they thought it was "cleaner". More signs that designers, lawyers and MBAs are moving to the fore forcing engineers out of the way at Google Search.
- hollerith 14y agoI noticed the same thing.
- 1337biz 14y agoSame here. Noticed that repeatedly. I have absolutely no idea why this should be helpful at all.
- incongruity 14y agoAs a designer, I decidedly resent that comment. Design is, by and large, supposed to be user-centric... and, obviously, this isn't a good situation for the user – so don't lump us in with the other people you blame. More – I don't really see how design can be blamed for bad engineering management choices, likely forced by lawyers or MBAs (I also have my MBA, but I know what most MBAs are about). Just say'n is all.
- magicalist 14y agoI disagree, I really like the change. If I'm searching on a programming problem, and google thinks the best two answers are both on stackoverflow, why shouldn't it show them both? There needs to be a balance -- 10 links from stackoverflow in a row is no better than a "show more results from stackoverflow" link since it gives me no sense of what other sites contain -- but it also used to drive me crazy that the only option was either one result from each site or all results from one site. I'd rather have two or three from a single site if they seem like good answers. "Dozens of results" from one site sounds like they're doing it very wrong sometimes, but the new way is much better in general.
- lelandbatey 14y agoMy first reaction on hearing this is the by demoting unauthorized content they will end up indirectly promoting authorized content. And I don't know how I feel about this. From what we've seen with Youtube where unwarranted claims have taken down videos very much under fair use, I don't want Google automatically demoting search results because of a claim made by another party. I foresee this causing no small amount of contention.
- fpgeek 14y agoI wonder what the secondary incentive effects of this will be. I see three possibilities: 1. Encourage copyright owners to send more takedowns to Google Search, since those takedowns will be "more powerful". 2. Encourage targeted sites to send more counter-notifications since a Google Search takedown has an effect on an entire site's ranking, not just a particular link. 3. Encourage shared sites (hosting providers, etc.) to shut down particular users or areas that get a lot of Google Search takedowns, to stop the spillover effect on the rest of the site. I don't know which of these effects will matter the most, but I suspect at least one of them will be behind a significant unexpected consequence of this change.
- jakeonthemove 14y agoNumber 1 and 2 are most likely to happen...
- latchkey 14y agoSo I guess YouTube won't show up in search results anymore. #doublestandard
- somesaba 14y agoright?? But obviously, this wont happen, and I don't think that's fair.
- hnriot 14y agoWith Google increasing it's content footprint over the years, it's interesting to see how the search group treats other Google groups. It's entirely possible to spend a day on the internet without leaving Google web properties (except hn, of course)
- armored_mammal 14y agoSounds like the path to breaking Google's "monopoly" has just been revealed... Seriously, unless it's just the faintest hint of influence I can see this blowing up in their face. Takedown notices are too ubiquitous and too often bogus.
- RealGeek 14y agoThis can be disastrous for user generated content websites.
- joeybaker 14y agoGoogle has not shown that it is able to competently handle copyright complaints. YouTube copyright take down notices happen all the time for legitimate content, chances are a similar ratio of false positives for site content.
- jakeonthemove 14y agoOh man, they should've never started with copyright removals in the first place (although I get that it's near impossible to do). This new filter has the same abuse potential as "negative SEO", where competitors posted so many spam links to good sites that they were dropped from the first page (with the competitor's site ranking higher as a result).
- soulclap 14y agoSounds like this might make it harder for companies to actually find websites posting 'stolen' content. Just saying.
- mistercow 14y agoIn addition to this being a dubious signal for measuring result quality, this could have a chilling effect for sites concerned about SEO. We've seen the bizarre rain-dance that businesses are already willing to do to try to improve their position in Google results, and now we can add "avoid fair use" to that dance.
- some1else 14y agohttp://dmcarank.staticloud.com http://dmcarank.staticloud.com DMCARank is a Google Custom search that only displays results from the top 50 domains with a high number of DMCA takedown requests (http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/?r=all-time http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...).
- yuhong 14y agoEFF's take: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/googles-opaque-new-policy-lets-rightsholders-dictate-search-results https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/googles-opaque-new-pol...